Category Archives: WordPress

Link

This post by Matt Mullenweg is pretty insightful:

WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

And I’ve felt exactly the same way, actually. Near the end of the ski season I noticed Jason Kottke had essentially duplicated his entire web experience on Tumblr just to allow users to properly repost, follow, and share his content.

I thought this was genius and started researching ways I could do this myself for Colorado Snow, which is self-hosted on WordPress. So, while you wait anxiously for Jetpack to add Tumblr support simply add the Tumblrize plugin and get started.

  • Question #1: Does this shut down the Tumblr versus WordPress.com “monthly traffic” and “active blog” statistics and comparisons? Probably.
  • Question #2: Will Tumblr get anxious about this and the potential for duplicate content, abuse, etc.? Probably not, eyeballs are eyeballs.

PS: Here’s my Colorado Snow blog on Tumblr, it only took about 5 minutes to set up and configure.

Worldwide WordPress 5K

Leave a reply

The folks at Automattic (who run WordPress.com) schedule an annual 5K run/walk. Not the kind where everyone shows up at the same place but one that is scheduled simultaneously around the world for everyone to participate in.

During this worldwide 5k week I participated in two:

1. Weekly Running Club

Every Tuesday the Denver Beer Co. hosts a running club where nearly a hundred folks all take off and run a 5k together around the Confluence Park area. Rachel and I plan to be there every week if possible.

2. March of Dimes

Every year Rachel and I walk with a family friend at the March of Dimes and this past Saturday it was at City Park in Denver. It was a great way to spend an early weekend morning.

I’ve become more and more accustomed to running over the years (and Nike Running is a fascinating athletics-turned-technology company story) so I hope to document more of these over time.

Introducing FavePersonal: a new WordPress Theme from Crowd Favorite

1 Reply

Yesterday the team and I at Crowd Favorite released our latest product offering: a WordPress theme for personal sites and bloggers that we built for, and use ourselves (that’s how you know it’s really good).

It’s been in the works for over a year now and based around a few cornerstones:

  • you should be able to own your various types of content (status updates, photos, videos, links, quotes) and maintain those on your own website without succumbing to a service like Tumblr;
  • you should still be able to participate on the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) where your friends participate;
  • you have the option easily customize the site to fit your style (custom color schemes using Adobe Kuler);
  • you should attractively showcase who you are and what you’re about (featured posts or photo in the header, Bio Widget with a profile and links)
  • and all this should be accessible from devices of all shapes and sizes (including mobile and tablet).

If you’re looking for a well-built, highly-designed WordPress theme for your own personal site (note: I also use it to run cosnow.com) I’d recommend you check out FavePersonal. It’s on sale now for only $49 which is a steal considering the average pricing of some of the other offerings out there and knowing it comes from one of the top WordPress design and development groups in the world (yes, I’ll toot our own horn).

I’ve thought a lot about how to “own” my content and how to create the simplest “social sharing” flow. The Path app is very close but it’s still closed down (I can’t easily get my content out) and it doesn’t offer the flexibility I want (photos should interact with Flickr or Instagram). FavePersonal is a step towards the ideal scenario. Expect more around this to come…

Link

Alex and I are headed to the warm land of Florida this Friday to attend and participate in WordCamp Orlando. The sessions look great and the folks organizing it have done a good job in the past. I’m looking forward to the conference.

Introducing Annotum: a scholarly publishing platform built on WordPress

5 Replies

Today Google announced some “out of season” spring cleaning: they will be closing Google Knol next May. Knol was originally created “to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles”.

Because of this, we at Crowd Favorite worked closely with Solvitor to create an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress that could serve as a new home for Knol users. Personally, I’ve been involved with this by leading, in conjunction with Solvitor, the design and development efforts around the new WordPress theme available today: Annotum.

This theme is unlike any other I’ve seen, it’s a sophisticated authoring and publishing platform with numerous features baked in. Originally designed with scientific and scholarly journals in mind, this is a great all-around theme for any publishers.

Knol users can now download their existing content via Google Takeout and take it wherever they’d like and/or set up a Annotum-based WordPress.com blog with a one-click(ish) process.

I’m excited to see the theme in the wild and proud to have worked with the excellent teams at Crowd Favorite, Solvitor, Google, and Automattic. Here’s a bit more about the project where you can learn more about it:

WordCamp San Francisco 2011 wrap up

4 Replies

WordCamp San Francisco is now the official, annual “WordPress conference” hosted by Automattic and the WordPress Foundation. This year the event was structured as a three-day, dual-track conference which is nearly a 200% increase in sessions with a very modest ticket price bump. The overall value is unbeatable if you’re a member of WordPress community. I had the opportunity to volunteer and help emcee the developer sessions on Saturday.

Andrew Ozz, Daryl Koopersmith, Mark Jaquith, Jane Wells, Andy Nacin, Jon Cave

I found the conference was heavily attended by hard-core designers and developers with the expected mix of bloggers and beginners. The mix is great, and its even more balanced than what we see in a smaller locale like Denver. That’s the joy of having an “official” conference with that kind of draw from all over the world. With the attendance of dozens of WordPress core contributors, consultants, freelancers, and “Automatticians”, you know you’re surrounded by some of the best and brightest in the space. This lead to insightful developer sessions and even more interesting “hallway sessions” throughout the weekend.

Here’s are some of my more noteworthy take-aways:

  • WordPress has matured to the point it has advanced tools and best practices becoming more public and widely known. I especially enjoyed learning a bit about unit testing, debugging, server scaling, security, and deployment.

  • Andy Skelton suggested Alex switch to Drupal to solve some of his problems, instead. ;)

  • Live-streaming a conference allows for a wider “back channel” discussion. I saw a lot of non-attendees tuning in from the live stream and posting a lot of good quips and insight to Twitter. Being “in person” at a conference is not always necessary.

  • The “mobile experiences” in WordPress as we know them are changing. There is a time and place where a custom theme is needed to re-present content in a different way (imagery-heavy sites). But, for most cases, considering responsive design when designing a website or blog experience can lead to less overall effort and maintenance. By focusing on a responsive WordPress administration dashboard we can rely much more on sophisticated mobile browsers than disparate native applications for each device. For bloggers and most websites, this also means you can focus on maintaining one codebase, one set of features, and a consistent user experience across devices.

  • Community and friendship is a feature of WordPress. When Alex and I (Crowd Favorite) share a ride back to the hotel with Nick and Mike (Voce Connect) there’s clearly a friendship and professional camaraderie which I’ve never seen in other spaces. When the core team sits on stage and jokes around as old friends, its clear that WordPress is more than a “project” or a “job” for most people. Plus, it’s certainly fun to catch up with (or meet) new friends that you’ve only experienced online.

  • Matt‘s “State of the Word” address can become a stand-alone event. It feels like it only scratches the surface of the plethora of things happening in the fast-paced WordPress community and could easily be twice as long. While some projects may get mentioned, others may feel left out. WordPress is just “too big” (a good problem to have!) to cover everything but he’s done a great job summarizing the project as it evolves. The preparation and design that goes into this presentation is worth watching again and again.

  • Except for notable exceptions Mark Jaquith and John James Jacoby, people from the internet seem shorter in person. ;)

I would recommend everyone going back and watching the sessions as they become available on WordPress.tv. See you at WordCamp San Francisco 2012!

Link

We at [Crowd Favorite](http://crowdfavorite.com) have been working with [MailChimp](http://mailchimp.com) on a slick new plugin for WordPress for a bit now. In short: it allows you to broadcast new posts to Twitter and Facebook, pulls in replies, mentions, comments and retweets, then allows visitors to log in as Facebook/Twitter identities and leave comments. This is a nice compliment to comments because it allows folks to continue the discussion elsewhere (like on Twitter, a la [Cognition](http://cognition.happycog.com/article/is-this-thing-on)) while allowing your site to remain the center of focus. You can see [Social](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social/) in action here on [my site](http://wordpress.reams.me/?p=2095#comments).

Want your name in lights on the new “Credits” page in [WordPress 3.2](http://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/wordpress-3-2-release-candidate/)? This page shows up in all WordPress.org blog dashboards (but interestingly enough, not on WordPress.com). If you use WordPress every day it’s pretty easy to get involved testing, filing bugs, and submitting patches on [Trac](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/). I found two small bugs in the new Twenty Eleven theme in about 30 minutes and submitted patches in just as little time.

Quickly add Open Graph to WordPress theme

3 Replies

I’ve found a lot of benefit adding Open Graph properties to my blogs. Primarily: more visitors. By adding simple code to my WordPress theme headers, social plugins like the ‘Like’ button will make your content display more meaningful within Facebook.

Which of these two articles would you be drawn to? Which would cause you to stop, read, and consider clicking through to?

Yet another easily ignorable line item:

Or this rich image and excerpt:

With WordPress I can easily drop a few lines of code into my theme’s header and make any ‘Liked’ content a little more compelling.

The Source

In the header, I’ve added a quick snippet to grab only the image URL of the featured image for the current post (via wpcanyon.com):


$thumb = get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID);
$pattern= "/(?<=src=['|\"])[^'|\"]*?(?=['|\"])/i";
preg_match($pattern, $thumb, $thePath);
$theSrc = $thePath[0];

I then add the following to define the required Open Graph properties:


<meta property="fb:admins" content="FACEBOOK ID" />
<? if (is_single()) { ?>
<meta property="og:title" content="<?php echo get_the_title(); ?>"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo $theSrc; ?>" />
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php the_permalink() ?>" />
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>" />
<meta propert="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" />
<? } ?>

And just like that, you’ve added all the necessary properties to your theme to tell anything that respects Open Graph (primarily Facebook) to your blog articles.

Be sure to use the Facebook URL Linter to test this out. Here’s an example of a recent post of mine.